Poor compliance with a healthcare provider or physician-prescribed medication regimen is a significant cause of disease-related morbidity and mortality. Poor medication adherence is estimated to cause about 125,000 deaths and about 33% to about 69% of medication-related hospital admissions annually. The aggregate cost of hospital admissions related to medication non-adherence alone is estimated to be about $100 billion per year and medication non-adherence accounts for about 10% of overall hospital admissions. Currently, about 50% of prescribed medications are not taken as directed. Noncompliance with prescribed medications leads to a deterioration of the medical condition, hospitalization, and irreversible loss of function, resulting in significant human and financial costs. A growing problem, both among young people and the elderly, is overuse or abuse of certain medications, for example, pain relievers and tranquilizers. Among the elderly, about 90% of healthcare recipients make medication errors, resulting in about 40% of hospital admissions for this growing segment of the American population. Cognition also generally declines with age. Consequently, elderly healthcare recipients may experience difficulty in acquiring, organizing, and remembering to take their medications as prescribed.
Many healthcare recipients with chronic conditions, for example, elderly patients on multiple medications have difficulty adhering to prescribed therapies. Such healthcare recipients typically consume about 2 medications to about 20 medications per day. In general, when more medications have to be taken and the more times each day the healthcare recipient must use various therapies, the more likely is the probability of medication errors. Often, healthcare recipients have co-morbid conditions that interfere with their adherence to medication regimens. These conditions may include, for example, diabetes and associated complications such as blindness or a lack of mobility, various neurological conditions and dementia, arthritis and associated difficulties in manipulating devices, and other debilitating conditions. In addition to pills, healthcare recipients take other medications, for example, parenterals such as injections, inhalers, eye drops, etc., and adherence to these medications is also very low. At times, healthcare recipients do not have access to transportation or a caregiver to collect their medications. Moreover, many medications are sensitive to certain environmental conditions, for example, heat, humidity, light, or cold. Over-exposure to these environmental conditions can reduce the potency or efficacy of the medications.
The New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI) estimates that eliminating prescription non-adherence can save $290 billion annually by avoiding additional visits to a doctor, emergency room (ER) visits, hospital admissions, and additional medications. Studies have shown a total annual per capita savings of about $7,823 for congestive heart failure, about $3,908 for hypertension, about $3,757 for diabetes, and about $1,259 for dyslipidemia in adherent healthcare recipients. To improve adherence, healthcare recipients need easy access to all of their medications on a regular basis and not have to handle multiple pill bottles which expire at different times, and need to go to a pharmacy as few times as possible for their medications or refills. Various previously proposed devices for testing compliance of healthcare recipients with prescribed medication regimens are unsatisfactory in that they are relatively cumbersome, not accurate, and do not adequately cover the extended time spans for which many prescribed dosing regimens must be maintained. Hence, there is a need for an improved device, for example, a pre-filled medication tray that accurately and conveniently packages individual doses of medication, in various forms such as a liquid form or a tablet form, which are more easily manageable in a safe and convenient manner, can be easily dispatched to the healthcare recipients, and which measures the compliance of healthcare recipients with physician-prescribed medication regimens.
Although a pre-filled medication tray ensures that the right medications are loaded and that a healthcare recipient has easy access to the medications, many healthcare recipients are still non-adherent. For example, when a healthcare recipient travels or is out for a day or is on vacation, the healthcare recipient may forget to carry his/her pre-filled medication trays. Moreover, a health plan, pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), or an at risk hospital system requires healthcare recipient adherent information on a dose by dose basis, and not only on a monthly basis. Furthermore, there is a potential of tampering with the pre-filled medication tray when the pre-filled medication tray contains high priced medications and opioids. High priced and/or abusable medications, for example, pain killers, opioids, etc., are typically securely packaged in the pre-filled medication tray to preclude tampering and removal of the high priced and/or abusable medications from the pre-filled medication tray. However, these medications can be removed from the pre-filled medication tray by creating an incision or a cut on front surfaces, rear surfaces, side surfaces, and/or undersides of containers in the pre-filled medication tray.
Hence, there is a long felt but unresolved need for a secure, enhanced pre-filled medication organizer tray apparatus that increases adherence to medications with minimal cost and support by efficiently organizing the medications, providing medical information associated with the medications, providing enhanced access to the medications, continuously monitoring medication adherence by a healthcare recipient, and transmitting alerts to healthcare providers and the healthcare recipient for reducing hospitalizations, readmissions, emergency room (ER) visits, home health visits, nurse support, etc. Furthermore, there is a need for a pre-filled medication organizer tray apparatus that can be easily dispatched to healthcare recipients, and that detects tampering, theft, or abuse of high priced medications and opioids.